It's called Ubiquity

HT: Grinding

"...I love the direct-to-page annotations… add maps, delete stuff, translate, calculate, with just a few words, and the result stays in the page and can be saved. The internet just became a playground." comment by KBlack at Grinding

Personal Health Monitoring advances

A family of three products are being unveiled, including the Wireless Automatic Blood Pressure Monitor, Wireless Precision Scale, and Wireless Activity Monitor. Utilizing FitLinxx, Inc.’s proprietary wireless technology all of the Wellness Connected products will be linked to provide users a comprehensive picture of their wellness. A complete record of blood pressure, weight, and activity transmits to a user’s computer automatically, where custom software saves and charts daily progress. Consumers can also conveniently send data to Actihealth(TM) internet service for enhanced functionality, to access their personal wellness information from anywhere, and to share their progress with family, friends, support groups, and medical professionals.

HT: Grinding.be

MedPedia Is Wikifying the Medical Search Space

Calley Nye
TechCrunch.com
Tuesday, July 22, 2008; 11:00 PM

The medical industry is one that thrives on innovation and evolution. New procedures, medicines, diseases, and theories are released practically every day. In such an environment, the need for a website to reflect and allow for documentation is apparent.

Medpedia is a new project, currently in development, that will offer an online collaborative medical encyclopedia for use by the general public. In order to keep the content accurate and up-to-date, content editors and creators have to have an MD or a PhD. Several highly-esteemed medical colleges will be contributing content to MedPedia, including Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and University of Michigan Medical School. Medpedia is also receiving support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and many other government research groups. The content from these organizations will then be edited by MedPedia's community of medical professionals.

MedPedia is currently in closed beta with a live preview site, where contributors can apply to be included, and users can submit feedback and suggestions. They plan on opening up their beta in late 2008.

Surveillance for Obesity Coming to London?

Apparently, they are measuring people's weight as they pass the cameras.

I am still thinking about how we can incorporate these types of tools in the future to facilitate response activities:

Citysense

Citysense eliminates the need to search
Instead, it evolves searching to sensing. Citysense passively "senses" the most popular places based on actual real-time activity and displays a live heat map. The application intelligently leverages the inherent wisdom of crowds without any change in existing user behavior, in order to navigate people to the hottest spots in a city. And it's not dependent on having a critical mass of users on the system.

Citysense is an application that learns
The application learns about where each user likes to spend time – and it processes the movements of other users with similar patterns. In its next release, Citysense will not only answer "where is everyone right now" but "where is everyone like me right now." Four friends at dinner discussing where to go next will see four different live maps of hotspots and unexpected activity. Even if they're having dinner in a city they've never visited before.

Powerful back-end infrastructure
Sense Networks has built a unique back-end infrastructure that processes years of data encompassing billions of points of positioning data. Created on the Macrosense platform, Citysense leverages this historical data analysis to normalize live location data originating from tens of thousands of devices and users moving throughout a given city.

Thanks to Global Guerrillas for this one.

And, on the farside:

Pachube

"...a web service that enables people to tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices and spaces around the world, facilitating interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual. The idea is to make it relatively simple to “plug” together interactive projects and buildings around the world, as well as to create embeddable graphs of sensor feeds."

Thanks to Grinding for this one.

Developed by Dr Nathaniel Hupert of Weill Cornell Medical College, the modeling software can be found on this site at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

SNS Tools. This is a secure site, and for now, I'd suggest you contact him at david.dickerson@dshs.state.tx.us for access information.

John Robb has this interesting post over at Global Guerrillas. Apparently, venture capital firm, KPCB has invested heavily in firms that stand to make huge profits in the event of a pandemic.

The Robot Dog

Another public health modeling blog to add to your information resources:

Public Health Preparedness Modeling

The site is hosted by Dr Jeffrey W. Herrmann of the University of Maryland, who is responsible for the development of Clinic Planning Model Generator, which is a POD modeling tool.